John Gilmore, Entrepreneur
and Civil Libertarian

In direct violation of the Privacy Act, which states that federal
agencies shall not record the how citizens use their First Amendment
rights (unless specifically instructed to do so by statute), the US
Department of Homeland Security recorded in my permanent dossier that
as I flew into San Francisco from London,
I had "many small flashlights with pot leaves on them. He had a book
entitled 'Drugs And Your Rights'. [sic]" Images of the flashlight and the book
are above.

The Gestapo cared what works of philosophy you were reading. So did the
Stasi. Those of you who live in free countries may find it a bit
hard to understand why any populace wouldn't tear to bits any bureaucrats
that would take away the fundamental right to read whatever you like
without it being used to determine how your government treats you as
you cross borders or travel within your own country.

Every country tells its citizens, and the world at large, that it is
a "free country". The USSR had a constitution with a bill of rights
much like that of the USA. Just as in the USA, those rights were not
enforced and not enforceable.

The United States is not a free country. Only when the DHS is dissolved,
disbanded, disempowered, and disrespected will there be any prayer of freedom.

Current Projects

Freedom Boxes.
Eben Moglen
created the Freedom Box Foundation to create and
spread tiny, cheap home servers that use free software to provide freedom
and privacy for individuals. These compete with "cloud-based" services
that put your privacy and your freedom under the control of third parties
who don't have your interest at heart. These boxes are designed to
make mass surveillance impractical and thus to safeguard political
liberty (even in countries that don't favor individual liberty). See the
video or
transcript of Eben's speech on
"Why Political Liberty Depends on Software Freedom More Then Ever".
I'm helping.

Freedom of Movement /
Secret Law. I sued TSA to make them
stop demanding that citizens identify themselves in order to travel.
Not only airports, but trains, cruise ships, and some buses, are now
"asking for" IDs. You can't read the rules -- they define your rights and
obligations, but they're super secret information (SSI). I petitioned
the US Supreme Court to examine whether the Feds can enforce secret
regulations. I lost every one of these lawsuits. The Constitution is
a dead letter as far as the one-branch Federal dictatorship is concerned.
Whatever the Executive does, Congress and the courts rubber-stamp.
What we did discover is that there is no requirement to show ID to
get on an airplane. TSA said so in their papers and in open court.
But each of these courts refused to make TSA stop lying to the public
with airport signs telling every passenger that their ID is "required".

If you politely decline to show ID whenever someone asks (or demands)
it, and continue politely declining regardless of how they escalate,
you will discover what your rights are. You'll be surprised. You'll
get away with it. Most of the people who were asking for it have no
right to demand it. They've been relying on your voluntary cooperation.
They forgot to tell you that part; but you just found it out for yourself.
Sometimes you may discover that you didn't have the right to live, move
around, or do business in your own country without government-issued
documents. That's very interesting knowledge to acquire first-hand too.
If you haven't recently tried exercising your right to exist and live
without government permission, are you sure you still have that right?

Deflating Idiocy About Security. The US government says we are always at an
"Elevated" threat level.
They have no plans to ever reduce this reported threat level down
to "Low", no matter how many years of untroubled life we go through.
It's like the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' "doomsday clock"
which in over fifty years has never been shown with less than 17 minutes
remaining before Armageddon. Well, 17 minutes have ticked past more than
a million and a half times since 1947, and the
bombs haven't blown us up. These are both scare tactics, not real reflections
of reality.

In reality, the likelihood of you being directly affected
by a terrorist attack has not gone up or down since 9/11; the likelihood
has always been extremely low. You and your friends are far more likely
to die in bed, in a car wreck, of heart disease, or by falling down the
stairs, than from a terrorist attack. Similarly, the risk of you or your
friends being directly affected by an atomic explosion is also low --
perhaps at 10AM rather than at 7-minutes-to-midnight.
More...

Disarming the rogue United States. The United States should
be forced by United Nations resolutions to surrender its "weapons of
mass destruction" or face the consequences. "That nation has gone beyond
the pale. It repeatedly threatens
and attacks other sovereign countries without provocation, holds massive
stocks of nuclear and conventional weapons, tortures its own
citizens and those of other countries, refuses to follow its own
constitution and laws, breaks international treaties which it co-created
and signed, holds 500,000 political
prisoners in its jails. It imprisons the largest number and percentage of its
people in the world. Every government with that kind of track record
needs to immediately disarm and submit to a regime change, or
face the consequences from the international community."

What's Wrong with Copy Protection?
Why should self-interested companies be permitted to shift the
balance of fundamental liberties, risking free expression, free
markets, scientific progress, consumer rights, societal stability, and
the end of physical and informational want? Because somebody might be
able to steal a song? That seems a rather flimsy excuse. This early
paper on DRM (Digital Rights Management) systems is still relevant in spots.

Things I've Started

A foundation dedicated to civil rights and civic responsibilities online.
Here's a few
documents
I made with EFF.
Here is a speech on
Privacy, Technology and the Open Society
that I gave at the First Conference on Computers, Freedom and Privacy.
I'm still quite active in EFF, and serve on its
Board of Directors.

An informal group dedicated to public education and dissemination of
encryption (also known as cryptography, the science and art of secret writing).
I originally hosted the mailing list (cypherpunks@toad.com)
and provided space for the first
few years' worth of meetings. A descendant of the mailing list is still
operating; subscribe to cryptography@metzdowd.com.

The "alt'' newsgroups on the Usenet
(with Brian Reid and Gordon Moffett)

A forum for discussions that the ``mainstream''
Usenet refused to handle, like sex, drugs, and gourmet cooking.
I supported nationwide (US) links among the original ``alt'' sites
until it became popular enough that almost everyone carried it.
I set the original newsgroup creation policy in ``alt'', which
was to ``Use common sense.'' Alt has flourished as a haven for
popular and unpopular topics, and was targeted by Compuserve
for censorship in December 1995 because they felt that some of the
free speech in it was too free for them to handle. The alt groups
are self-regulating (or self-unregulating) and I have not been involved
in alt policy or group creation in many years.

A company that provides commercial support for free software.
They support the
GNU programming software (from the
Free Software Foundation),
I co-managed the company, provided engineering leadership, was the
official maintainer of GDB for several years and led the GDB programming
team, supported numerous customers,
and led the Cygnus Network Security (Kerberos) product team.
I instituted a culture of distributed hiring, automated software testing,
and frequent software releases across
scores of platforms, much of which persists to this day.
I stopped working daily at Cygnus in April 1995, and left the Board
of Directors in January, 1997. The company was bought by
Red Hat, Inc in November, 1999,
for $675 million. They're still doing fine as a big piece of Red Hat.

A medium-sized Internet Service Provider in the San Francisco Bay Area.
now merged into Verio.
We mostly sold T1 and 56K Internet connections to businesses.
We were distinguished from many other early commercial providers by our
common-carrier attitude: "You are free to resell the service that we
provide to you, and we will not censor it."
This enabled a whole crop of smaller resellers
in various locales to buy from us and offer
other services to the public (like modem-based Internet connections).
These resellers contributed to our volume of Internet traffic,
and enabled us to provide higher quality service at lower prices.
TLGnet was sold to Best Internet Communications
in July, 1996, and my active involvement in it ended. (Best was then
bought by Hiway Technologies, which was
then bought by Verio.)

A software project that decodes and encodes radio and audio signals in
software. It's a specific example of "Digital Signal Processing", but
designed to be good at handling high speed (or wideband) signals. It's free
software.

GNU Radio can receive and decode over-the-air HDTV signals in the
US standard "ATSC" format. This decoder enables researchers to demonstrate
a full software implementation of the ATSC format, and also provides a
reference implementation for other designers. The decoder software currently
(May 2003) runs about 40x slower than realtime, but enables the realtime
recording, slow decoding, and later full-speed playback of HDTV signals.
I have verified that the software works, on my own equipment. Here are
example images #1
and #2 decoded on May 13, 2003
from KQED-DT, channel 30 in San Francisco, California.

In 2008 I catalyzed
Kestrel Signal Processing's
donation of the OpenBTS cellphone base-station
software to the Free Software Foundation as part of GNU Radio. In 2009
I wrote and contributed smqueue, an
SMS text message queueing and delivery module,
to that part of GNU Radio.

No working free software or open source flash player existed to
display the average web page that contains embedded Macromedia Flash
objects. Richard Stallman therefore made such a player a high
priority project for the Free Software Foundation.

I knew Rob Savoye
from Cygnus, and knew he'd done some work on an embedded Flash player,
so I asked if I could pay him for six months to turn that open source
embedded Flash player into a GNU flash player. He agreed, and the
Gnash project was born. It currently provides a standalone player
which builds and runs on a variety of systems, using OpenGL
and other renderers, plus a browser plugin. The project is now financially
supported by a commercial company, Lulu.com, which stands to benefit
from its rapid evolution. It is now able to play Flash videos from
YouTube
and Lulu.tv. Stay
tuned; a solid community of contributors are improving it daily.

Things I've Put A Lot of Energy Into

Sun is a computer manufacturer, long a leader in the technical workstation
and database markets. Many Web pages are served from a Sun server.
Sun is now a multi-billion-dollar company; working there made me
financially independent. It was acquired by Oracle in 2010.
I was its fifth employee, and later a consultant. I handled architecture, design, implementation, and debugging of Sun
Workstations.
Wrote and maintained
bootstrap and diagnostic ROMs for the Sun-1, Sun-2, and Sun-3.
Debugged first prototypes of Sun-1 and Sun-2, working with the
hardware designer. Worked on first bringup ever of Unix on
Motorola 68010 and 68020. Designed and diagnosed the chip
designs for the SPARCstation-1 and SPARCstation-2.
Straddled the hardware and software
camps to locate, explain, and solve design, implementation, and
manufacturing problems. Pulled many chestnuts out of fires.
Debugged Unix utilities, kernel, device drivers, and CAD software.
Diagnostics. Documentation. Electronic mail maintenance,
support, and enhancement. Performance and code generation
improvement. General technical support. Network relations.
Contributed to lively corporate culture.

Free Software means software that comes with freedom -- not software that
has a price of 0. In particular, it means software that gives everyone the
source code (what programmers need to keep a program running and improve
on it) and the right to use the program, modify it, and give or sell copies to
anyone. The new buzzword for this is "Open Source", but it's been called
"Free Software" for decades.

In the early days of computing, almost all software was free.
IBM's operating systems, for example, came with source code and the
right to copy and modify it. This gradually changed as software became
more independent from hardware. Richard Stallman realized the loss
to the industry from the change, and formalized the issue with the
GNU General Public License
and his project to re-implement Unix freely in 1983.

I ported Richard's GNU Emacs to the Sun
Workstation that year. I started archiving the free software posted to
the Usenet in 1981, and continued through 1987 or so. I started a project
to "sift the sands of Berkeley Unix", collaborating with UCB and other Unix
hackers to sort the nuggets of original,
nonproprietary code out from the background of AT&T-licensed code. Ultimately
this resulted in the Berkeley "Networking 2" release, which didn't require
the recipient to have an AT&T license.
In 1985 I wrote the "pdtar" program, which eventually became
GNU Tar.
In 1986 I tested pre-releases and
each public release of the
GNU C Compiler (now called the GNU Compiler
Collection).
I wrote GNU UUCP and hacked on
the GNU Debugger and GNU Make in 1988 and 89.
I ported most of Berkeley Unix through GCC in 1989
for UC Berkeley, so they could abandon the proprietary AT&T C compiler,
as part of the effort to make BSD Unix freely available.
In 1989 I co-founded Cygnus Support, the first company dedicated to supporting
free software. Cygnus has made major contributions to free software,
including better documentation, quality assurance,
cross-compilation, many ports to new
hardware and operating systems, and marketing help to get free software
accepted by the computing mainstream. While at Cygnus I maintained the
GNU Debugger (GDB)
from 1990 through 1993. I worked on MIT's free Kerberos software for Cygnus
from 1994 through 1995.
I served on the Program Committee for the First Conference on
Freely Redistributable Software in February 1996. Throughout 1996
I worked on securing the Berkeley Internet Name Daemon ("BIND"), the free
software which holds the Internet together by mapping domain names to
and from numeric Internet addresses, using
Domain Name System Security ("dnssec").

From 1996-2003 I co-created and
sponsored FreeS/WAN,
which added IPSEC (cryptographic security and
privacy) to Linux's Internet networking support.
In 2001 I co-created and sponsored GNU Radio,
a framework for digital signal processing of radio-frequency signals.
In 2005 I co-founded GNU Gnash with
Rob Savoye
(who is doing all the work).
In 2007, Don Hopkins and I convinced
Electronic Arts to
release Will Wright's original groundbreaking
SimCity game
(which started the billion-dollar Maxis/EA "Sim" series of games),
released for free to the children of the world under the GNU General Public
License (v3) as "Micropolis" (its original code-name). I also helped
the
One Laptop Per Child project
with quality assurance, writing and editing, tech support, and other
collaboration.
In 2009 I wrote smqueue, a queueing and delivery system for
SIP-based text messaging,
which processes SMS messages for cellphones handled by
OpenBTS GSM cellphone base-station
software (which is part of GNU Radio).
I still contribute occasional changes to various free software program.

Freedom of Information

I have put a lot of time and money into researching what the government
is doing, using Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. I have sued the
US Government several times to enforce the FOIA against agencies
who have little or no interest in letting the public know, in a
timely fashion, what they have been doing to or for us.

In 2006 I sued the government to demand that it either publish the secret
law that requires citizens to show ID in order to travel in the United
States -- or to stop enforcing that secret law. This is part of my
Freedom to Travel
case. The FOIA does not apply to this secret law, because Congress
specifically exempted airline security directives from the FOIA.
Congress could not exempt them from the Constitution, which requires
that citizens be given notice of what the law requires -- but the courts
did exempt them from it, by refusing my case every step of the way.

Encryption is secret writing. Codes and ciphers. Spies.
Encryption was originally used by military and diplomatic organizations;
Julius Caesar invented an encryption scheme.
In the last century,
electronic communication (telegraphy and radio) made it widely useful, and
computerization has made it extremely cheap. Widespread public
networking has made it useful to everyone, for everything from
putting "envelopes" around your email for privacy, moving
money around the net safely, to
proving that you're really you when you're halfway
around the world.

The US government is deathly afraid of its own citizens
(and non-US-citizens)
having access to good encryption.
This fear extends all the way up to the Vice President and the head
of the FBI, who personally
get involved in creating encryption policy.
Everyone in government refuses to tell us why, saying it's classified
and the national security is at stake. Rubbish! The security of the
nation is already gone when its government violates the basic
rights of its own citizenry, as these agencies do every day.
They are "burning the Constitution in order to save it".
(My own belief is that what's really at stake is
a wiretap-based power base that J. Edgar Hoover and the
classified spy agencies have built up for their own benefit.)

The most Byzantine set of laws,
regulations, policies, departments, and practices you've ever heard of
are employed by the National Security Agency and three or four other
Executive Branch departments in an attempt to keep good crypto from bad guys.
Unfortunately, they have also succeeded in keeping good crypto from good
guys who have constitutional rights. I instigated a
lawsuit
to correct this, with Dan Bernstein as plaintiff and the Electronic
Frontier Foundation backing him up. I was a technical advisor to the
lawyers in the case. On December 6, 1996, Judge Patel decided that the
export regulations are unconstitutional. The government appealed, and
on May 6, 1999, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals
agreed
with her. The government appealed to an 11-judge panel in the 9th Circuit (an
"en banc review"), which was granted, and then the government "voluntarily"
changed the encryption export regulations so that most free software and
academic research, and a lot of proprietary encryption software as well,
can be easily published from the US. The "en banc review" of the
old regulations became moot, and the case has been handed back down to
Judge Patel, who ultimately ended it. The new regulations are even more complex
than the old ones, and carry the same old harsh penalties for inadvertent
violation. They need to not just be "reformed" but scrapped.

The government claims to retain the
right to change those rules whenever it wants, and restrict encryption
software again if it chooses.
Congressman Judd Gregg announced support for doing
so in the week of hysterical reaction after the World Trade Center was
destroyed by hijacked airliners, but was shouted down by the people who'd
spent a decade fighting this battle before he could
gather any political support.

I led the team that built the world's first publicly announced DES Cracker, a machine that
finds the secret key used to encrypt messages in the government's
favorite encryption scheme, the Data Encryption Standard (DES). The
National Security Agency intervened when the scheme was being
standardized in the early 1970s, shortening the secret keys so that
they could build their own DES Crackers. But they spent the next 25
years lying to us about how secure the scheme is, to encourage
everyone to use it -- and we did. This left NSA able to secretly
eavesdrop on anyone who used DES, which includes the entire financial
community, and most computer and network security systems. Technology
has advanced to where anyone with $200,000 can break the code, leaving
all of our DES-protected infrastructures at risk.
Thanks NSA! By 2010
much of the older DES-based software has been replaced, though there
are a few places that still use it, and its use is still an option in some
protocol implementations even though it is known to be insecure.
NIST has standardized a new algorithm with much longer keys, which
has not been studied nearly as long as DES, but which has resisted all
attacks so far.
Smart people long ago stopped designing DES into new systems.
Triple-DES or AES seem to be the preferred replacements.

Securing the Internet

As I say below, my
FreeS/WAN project
is to secure Internet traffic against wiretapping.

The US policy on "illegal drugs" has been a terrible, hurtful sham for my
entire life. Today there are more than 2,300,000 people in prison in
the United States -- supposedly the freest country in the world.
One quarter of the world prison population is imprisoned in the US.
We have imprisoned a larger number AND a larger percentage of our
citizens than in every single other country. Minorities are imprisoned
at large multiples of their actual incidence of criminal behavior.

458,000 of those people were in prison for non-violent mind-altering
drug charges in 2000;
about 500,000 in 2008.
(The federal Bureau of Justice Statistics reported 155,900 in city or county jails for
drug offenses (2002); 251,400 in state prisons
(2008);
and 95,205 in
federal prison
(2009)
- more than half of all federal prisoners.)
Many of these political prisoners are otherwise law-abiding people, making families
and pulling their weight in society. The vast majority of them are black or
Hispanic. Don't forget the additional 582,759 nonviolent drug users on probation and the 261,666 on parole in
2009.)
The policy that locks all of them up,
and makes their drug-using friends fear their own government, is
wicked
and racist. It damages our citizens' respect for the law, it encourages
corruption in our government institutions, it has been responsible for
major losses of our constitutional rights, and has wasted hundreds of billions
of taxpayer dollars. It has also cost millions of people their time
and money to fight the criminal justice system. It encourages violent
resolution of commercial disputes with drug sellers, by denying
recourse to courts, harming not only those people but their families,
neighborhoods, and innocent bystanders. The US has forced this policy
down the throats of countries all over the Earth, vastly multiplying
the misery and injustice it creates. And it artificially raises the
prices of these substances, feeding our citizens' money to many violent
and irresponsible suppliers. At least
68 million people have used illegal
drugs (as of 1996), including our own Presidents, but the madness persists. The
obvious lies that the government tells in furthering its drug policy
make every thinking citizen doubt other statements -- even true ones --
from such an obviously corrupt government.

Besides the practical issues, there are fundamental rights involved.
The right to speak freely is irrelevant if the citizenry does not have the
right to think freely. Our government's control of drugs is really
intended to control our citizens' mental states. The substances themselves
are not important unless they affect human minds (and some, such as
nitrous oxide, are freely sold for non-mind-altering uses, but
controlled when people wish to influence their own mental states).

These drugs appear to be prohibited by the government because they
permit users to see that the world is not composed of a single point of
view, a single concrete reality shared by all. The way each of us
interacts with the world is a function of our internal brain chemistry,
which is unique to each of us, and can be altered by our own choice or
by imposed choices. The government seeks to impose its answer to
the choice of whether or not to view reality in certain ways. These
altered ways have clearly been useful in religion, art, music,
medicine, and recreation for millennia. These government
attempts to control the minds of its citizens are a direct violation of the
basic constitutional freedoms that the government is designed to secure
for ourselves and our posterity.

I have known many people throughout my life who are able to use
drugs in appropriate settings without harm to themselves or to others.
I have known a few who were unable to control their use, and abused
drugs. Today's policy does not "cure" these drug abusers, nor successfully
remove them from society. The huge number of harmless users swept up
in the gears of "justice" swamp the system, preventing the real troublesome
people from being reformed or isolated.

Just as adults keep immature children away from matches and hot objects,
though there is no law prohibiting the possession of matches by
children, parents and social feedback should be used to teach children
how to handle drugs responsibly. The War on Drugs has certainly not kept
children from being able to get drugs! By eliminating the black market
and the threat of prison, and allowing straightforward talk from people
who know the dangers first-hand, children can learn the real reasons
why some drugs are best avoided, and learn the line between use and
abuse of other drugs. Today's situation teaches children that it's
best to sneak and lie about what they're doing -- both because they
are afraid of prosecution, and because they see drug-using parents
doing the same thing.

I believe that mind-altering drugs should be usable and sellable under
the same rules and the same taxes that apply to substances like flour,
sugar and coffee. If the label says it's pure Humboldt County
marijuana of 18% THC content, then it had better really contain that, or
the seller is in legal trouble.
Otherwise, no restrictions, no special taxes, no more black markets.
If someone consumes a drug in a way that damages people around them (or
seriously threatens to), they should be held responsible -- whether the
drug is coffee, alcohol, or cocaine.

No matter who you are, you know someone who uses illegal drugs. Talk
with these people about the real effects and the real dangers of the
drugs they use, compare what they tell you to what the government
tells you, and ask them about how the current drug laws and policies
affect their life. If you think you don't know any drug users, think
again of who you know. Are you really sure about all of them? If you
still can't think of anyone, ask your friends in private whether they
have ever used illegal drugs. You'll be surprised at what some of
them have been afraid to tell you. Learn from what they know, but
learn especially from the paranoia and fear they have had to live in.
Then work with me for a peaceful end to the Drug War and a sane policy
for how to treat our fellow citizens.

This project seeks to build millions of small, child-friendly laptops and
get them into the hands of students in Third World countries. The laptops
and software are being designed by educators with decades of experience
teaching kids using computers, like Alan Kay and Seymour Papert. Their
business model is to sell the computers to the education bureacracies of
countries, in place of paper textbooks. The computers will contain many
textbooks, and also provide much more infrastructure for learning. The
software is almost exclusively free software or open source, giving both
the project and the students limitless opportunities to customise, improve,
share, and understand how their systems work.

I helped around the edges with introductions, strategy, specs,
testing, Secure Digital hardware, and little bits of programming. In
particular, I made sure that the hardware would handle SDHC cards (larger
than 2GB), and worked on understanding and clearing the software roadblocks
that kept the project from reducing the power consumption of the hardware.
I also got the original SimCity game released for the OLPC as "Micropolis".

Other Interests

We have recently finished another decennial data-rape, also known as the Census.
But you shouldn't tell the Census anything. The law says they can't release
the info you provide for 99 years -- but if they want to, they just change
the law. They've done it twice before.
When the US Government rounded up Japanese-Americans during WW2, the "Second War Powers Act" let them
use the supposedly private census data to tell the thugs where their
victims lived. Homeland Security zealots extracted similar data
about Muslims and Middle Easterners in 2003, under the Patriot Act. Will your innocent
ancestry, profession, or hobby be the target of the next hysterical
witch-hunt? By then it will be too late to un-reveal your information.
Don't help the government constrain you; always decline to give them
information. They aren't recording it for your benefit.
Details

USENIX is "the Advanced Computing Systems Association". It
started off with meetings and technical conferences for the original
creators of Unix, but as those folks expanded their interests into
other fields, it too has widened. I attended lots of USENIX
conferences in the '80s, met many great and talented people, and
learned a lot about Unix from them. I got busy in the late '80s and
through the '90s, reconnected in 2000, ran for the Board of
Directors on a platform of addressing the social impacts of
technology, and was elected to two 2-year terms. I left the
board in 2004.

The Libertarians are a political party dedicated to small and simple
government. I'm a life member. I consider the two major parties in the US
to both be morally bankrupt, and largely indistinguishable from each other.
Under both of them, US and state governments continue to grow in size, cost,
and influence over their citizens. Both support completely indefensible
policies such as the drug policies of the last forty years, unprovoked
attacks on countries like Iraq that never did anything to the US, and "money
laundering" laws that criminalize financial privacy.

C2net was started by Sameer Parekh and other cypherpunks in the
early 1990's. It now sells and supports Stronghold, a version of the
popular Apache web server that contains strong encryption. Stronghold
is a market leader among secure web servers. C2, like my own
FreeS/WAN IPSEC project, develops and archives its encryption programs
outside the United States, so they can be freely shipped and used worldwide.
I joined the board of C2net in 1998 and served there until it was
acquired by Red Hat, Inc, in 2000.

CodeWeavers is a commercial company that's developing and supporting
the free Wine software, and helping companies who have MS-Windows
products port them to Unix. I started talking with them in 1998,
invested in the company in 2000, and now serve on its board.

I was a member of the Internet Society for many years. I was
elected to its Board of Trustees in July 1997, for a three-year term.

Things I've Said (That People Sometimes Remember)

"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."

This was quoted in Time Magazine's December 6, 1993 article "First Nation
in Cyberspace", by Philip Elmer-DeWitt.
It's been reprinted hundreds or thousands of
times since then, including the NY Times
on January 15, 1996, Scientific American of October 2000,
and CACM 39(7):13.

In its original form, it meant that the Usenet software (which moves
messages around in discussion newsgroups) was resistant to censorship because,
if a node drops certain messages because it doesn't like their subject,
the messages find their way past that node anyway by some other route.
This is also a reference to the packet-routing protocols that the Internet
uses to direct packets around any broken wires or fiber connections or routers.
(They don't redirect around selective censorship, but they do recover
if an entire node is shut down to censor it.)

The meaning of the phrase has grown through the years.
Internet users have proven
it time after time, by personally and publicly replicating
information that is threatened with
destruction or censorship. If you now consider the Net to be not only
the wires and machines, but the people and their social structures who
use the machines, it is more true than ever.

"The federal government is trying to build a surveillance society. They may be doing it with the best or worst of intentions. But the job of building a surveillance database and populating it with information about us is happening largely without our awareness and without our consent."

The essence of "watching" or "looking" is focusing your attention.
If you diffuse your attention to encompass everything, you end up missing
everything. This is exactly what the US Government is doing with
its police-state tactics (searching everyone who travels; fingerprinting
every foreigner who is stupid enough to arrive; etc). I said this in
a message to
Declan McCullagh's "Politech" list in March 2003.

"Reducing the transaction costs of co-operation"

This is what free software does. When the published copyright terms
of intellectual property permit anyone to modify or improve it and
re-distribute it, there is no transaction cost for people to do so.
When the terms disallow these things, anyone who wants to do them must
negotiate with the owner. This takes energy and time; most people
never bother, so most improvements never get made. Often the improvement
is small, like a corrected paragraph in a book, a bug-fix in software, or
smoothing out a user interface glitch. Transaction costs
must be very low for these kind of cooperative improvements. But the
impact of hundreds of small improvements is a substantial increase in
quality and function, which is quite hard and expensive to duplicate
in uncooperative environments.

Books are more frequently updated by their readers this way than software,
because books arrive with their "source code" -- the text -- visible to
and correctable by the reader. A short note back to the author suffices.
The Whole Earth Catalog was regularly improved this way.

"How many of you have broken no laws this month?"

There are too many laws, and the wrong things are illegal.
Drugs, sexual publications, hiring a housekeeper and not paying Social Security,
jaywalking, loitering, nontraditional sex or marriage,
paying someone less than a
government-set wage, not wearing motorcycle helmets, owning or wearing guns,
choosing your own medicines, designing or constructing your own house,
owning software that can copy DVDs,
exporting cryptography, driving at the same speed as the rest of the traffic;
all these things should be legal. What laws have YOU broken this month?

Any country that makes every citizen a felon is heading for real trouble.
We need to reform the legislative system
that keeps producing too many of the wrong laws.
I first said this in a
speech
to the First Conference on Computers,
Freedom, and Privacy in 1991.

"That's the kind of society I want to build. I want a guarantee -- with
physics and mathematics, not with laws -- that we can give ourselves
real privacy of personal communications."

In World War II, the United States imprisoned thousands of American
citizens of Japanese descent, simply because of their Japanese heritage.
In the drug war, the United States is currently imprisoning more than a million
citizens, solely because they choose to alter their own or their customers'
state of mind with physical substances.

I believe that within fifty years we will stand shamed,
in our own opinion and in world opinion, for this travesty
of justice and civil rights. We will offer recompense to our
citizens unjustly deprived of their liberties due to this spasm of paranoia.
Whether we can ever repair the Bill of Rights, or restore public trust
in honest government, is a much harder problem.

I made this remark in an email message on 2/26/1993
to the PEM-DEV@TIS.COM mailing list, complaining that I couldn't use
the PEM encryption software because the fascists who ran the naming
hierarchy wouldn't give me the name I chose. I wanted a name like
"O=gnu(_at_)cygnus(_dot_)com". The main objection to this sort of
"easy and obvious" name is, (the quote above). That is, when the X.500
hierarchy takes over the world, "bad" names like that one won't work any more.
I switched to using PGP, which didn't impose any craziness on the names
people could use.

Press Mentions

Many aren't on the web, and most of the web ones aren't indexed here,
but here are a few:

26 January 2011: Business Insider's DK Matal reports in Egypt Revolt Post-Tunisia: Is A Dam Breaking? that "Despite this censorship, such is the power of distributed computing social media -- supported over multiple communication channels -- that local twitter users are currently sending tweets via mobile telephone text messages and third party software applications," thus fulfilling my old quote.

1 August 2010: The Manchester Guardian (UK)'s John Naughton repeats my censorship quote in WikiLeaks:
look before you leak..., then notes that "The aphorism came up a lot last
week following publication by the Guardian, the New York Times and
Der Spiegel of extensive reports based on the stash of classified US
military reports published on the WikiLeaks website. And of course in
one sense this latest publishing coup does appear to confirm Gilmore's
original insight. But at the same time it grossly underestimates the
amount of determination and technical ingenuity needed to make sure that
the aphorism continues to hold good." Hey, how much determination and
technical ingenuity can YOU put in a 10-word sound bite?

4 April 2010: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's Ced Kurtz reports
that Stewart Brand's 'Whole
Earth' goes digital, and mentions his role in the early history of
the Well and the EFF.

7 January 2010: The Orange County Weekly reports in Today,
Medical Marijuana. Tomorrow, Legalize It! that the Drug
Policy Alliance's "annual budget of $8 million comes in part from George
Soros' Open Policy Institute [I think they mean Open Society Institute
--gnu] and also from about 25,000 small donors and a number of very
wealthy businessmen, most notably tech guru John Gilmore of Cygnus
Solutions, Peter B. Lewis of Progressive Insurance, John Glen Sperling
of the University of Phoenix and George Zimmer of the Men's Wearhouse."
Clearly this isn't a very well fact-checked article, and they never
talked to me about it. Though I was a DPA donor in earlier years, I had
stopped giving them money after 2007, because of my privacy concerns with how
DPA tracks their members and donors online.

September 2004: Oakland Tribune's Sean Holstege:
Judges:
Security fight must be in open. The Transportation Security
Administration (TSA) tries to convene a secret court for a secret
trial of my lawsuit about their secret regulations that prevent ordinary
non-secret citizens from traveling unless they bring their Nazi paperwork
(I mean their government-issued photo ID). The judges decide to have
an ordinary trial, open to the public.

January '02: L.A. Times:
Freedom Fighters of the Digital World, talking about EFF's
efforts to protect civil liberties despite anti-terrorism crap shoved
down americans' sheeplike throats by government thugs -- and about how I
was the only one to ask about those hundreds of people imprisoned without
trials, charges, or bail: "Are all the civil rights organizations afraid
to step up to defend potential terrorists?"

October '00: Scientific American, p. 36, in the sidebar "How
Publius Thwarts Censors", saying that the net routes around censorship.

May '93: Wired's Steven Levy covers the Cypherpunks:
Crypto
Rebels. That's Tim May, Eric Hughes, and me on the
cover,
behind
masks representing privacy. One of the
sidebars
is about my Freedom of Information tug-of-war with NSA over some documents.

Archives

The National Transportation Safety Board
investigates all airplane
accidents, from the most mundane to the largest crashes.
They have not investigated any of the events of 9/11.
Search here for all crashes
between September 1, 2001 and September 30, 2001. Virtually all of
them have had their "Probable Cause" released after investigation,
with a full report. Read a few reports; see the detail of their
investigations. Then look at the reports for
the 9/11 crashes, which say nothing but:

NTSB Identification: DCA01MA065
Scheduled 14 CFR Part 121: Air Carrier operation of United Airlines
Accident occurred Tuesday, September 11, 2001 in Shanksville, PA
Aircraft: Boeing 757, registration: N591UA
Injuries: 44 Fatal.
The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 are under the jurisdiction
of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The Safety Board provided
requested technical assistance to the FBI, and this material generated
by the NTSB is under the control of the FBI. The Safety Board does not
plan to issue a report or open a public docket.

Call their Public Affairs office at +1 202 314 6100. Demand to know why
they're stonewalling the public on the most important airplane crashes
of the decade. They've published basic Flight Data Recorder analyses,
logs of radio transmissions,
and radar analyses at their
FOIA site, but no analysis of the crash remains, nor about why the
planes hit the ground -- in particular Flight 93. You can also
get about 100 hours of MP3 audio recordings of 9/11/2001 radio traffic
from NORAD at the
Government Attic.Org web site.

Your chance of having bad things happen to you as a
result of "security" measures taken by your government is definitely
on the rise. The U.S. Government has killed at least ten times as many
innocent people in anti-terrorist wars after 9/11/01 than were killed
by terrorist activity on and since 9/11/01. If you are an innocent
person living in Afghanistan or Iraq,
you are far more likely to die from the intentional act of a US Government
soldier than you are to be killed by any other terrorists.

Many US citizens have spent time in jail because extra "anti-terrorism"
searches found illegal things (that had nothing to do with terrorism).
Thousands of immigrants have been imprisoned without cause, and thousands
more have been deported for trivial non-safety-related crimes like
overstaying a visa. (Many thousands more have left even though they
were here legally, figuring out that they did not want to live in a
society like what the U.S. has become.) Our former corrupt Attorney-General
decided that every prosecutor and every judge should impose maximum
sentences for every detected crime. Our latest corrupt Attorney-General
nominee was the architect of the US torture in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib
that violated international law and every norm of civilized conduct.
These actions have nothing to
do with making us safer, and everything to do with building detailed
control over people. A public that's constantly herded into
fearfulness is far more likely to give away the blessings of liberty
that we "ordained and established" a federal government to protect for us.

The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals came to a similar conclusion in
Bourgeois
v. Peters, in which it found "Given that we have been on 'yellow
alert' for over two and a half years now, we cannot consider this a
particularly exceptional condition that warrants curtailment of
constitutional rights. We cannot simply suspend or restrict civil
liberties until the War on Terror is over, because the War on Terror
is unlikely ever to be truly over. September 11, 2001, already a day
of immeasurable tragedy, cannot be the day liberty perished in this
country. Furthermore, a system that gave the federal government the
power to determine the range of constitutionally permissible searches
simply by raising or lowering the nation's threat advisory system
would allow the restrictions of the Fourth Amendment to be
circumvented too easily. Consequently, the 'elevated' alert status
does not aid [a government attack on civil rights]."

Comments on Emergency Re-Sentencing of Ecstacy.
There is no need for an "emergency" change to the
sentencing provisions for Ecstacy; democracy requires full public
participation. Congress did not mandate an increase in penalties; it
mandated a review of penalties to make them appropriate. The
penalties for use or sale of MDMA should be decreased, not increased.
The discovery, manufacturing and distribution of MDMA has provided
positive benefits to millions of citizens. Sentencing guidelines
penalizing MDMA use are an unconstitutional regulation of the freedom
of thought that underlies many cherished freedoms, and should be
eliminated. The re-sentencing of MDMA is part of a misguided attempt
to "lock up the truth" -- or at least to lock up the truth-tellers --
about MDMA.

Securing Internet traffic against wiretapping.
Given the current rampage of Federal cops, it is even more important that
honest citizens and businesses protect themselves from wiretapping, by
deploying good encryption both in your own systems, and for communication
with anyone else. If we can secure 5% of the traffic this year, we can
secure 20% next year; and
80% two years out. The whole Internet will have been secured. Want to help?

Verio censored my email, and ultimately cut off my net access, under
anti-spam pressure.
I am not a spammer, and have never
sent any spam.
But Verio blocked
outgoing email from my machine. I was not able to send
person-to-person email to my friends, my colleagues at EFF, or anyone
else.
I think this is wrong.
Any measure for stopping spam should have as its first
goal "Allow and assist every non-spam message to reach its
recipients."
I found a new provider, United Layer,
who is not trying to censor me. I encourage everyone to boycott Verio's
Internet service, until they fix both their "Acceptable Use Policy"
and their enforcement policies.

Al Queso seeks U.S. school technologies.
Terroristas from impoverished lands desparately seek information
about US technologies that are used to educate and control U.S. students.
Concerned parents should remain cowed but pliant.